The weblog of Norman Geras

July 31, 2013

Those are both from a post on philosophical humour by Gerald Dworkin. I like the observation he quotes that 'Hegel loses a lot in the original'. There's also a longer joke about Talmudic interpretation that I commend to your attention. And this. (Thanks: SdeW.)

After the recent 'discovery' of John Williams's Stoner and the enthusiasm for itin this household, among many other places, I decided to try another of Williams's novels. I have just read Butcher's Crossing. The first thing to say about it is that it disproves the claim sometimes heard that every writer keeps re-writing the one book they have in them. Butcher's Crossing is nothing like Stoner. Where the former's setting is a university department, the latter's is the American west. It's ostensibly about hunting buffalo in the mountains of Colorado; and it confirms that Williams was a superb writer. The setting may be very different, but the book is visibly by the same hand, displaying the same economy and clarity of expression. I can't understand why Williams isn't better known.

Because of how different the two books are in subject matter, I can't confidently recommend Butcher's Crossing to those who enjoyed Stoner. I will only say that it's a lot more than a 'western'. It's about a young man's quest to escape from the limitations of his life back on the east coast, and to find, by going west, the spaces of America. And it's about his hope that nature may still hold meanings that have been cramped and distorted by civilization. And it's about just finding a purpose for one's own life. And about the myths exposed and disappointments met in the realities of that buffalo hunt - not only for the main protagonist. As it strikes me, Butcher's Crossing is a powerful precursor to the best of Cormac McCarthy; that might tell you whether or not you want to give it a try.

July 30, 2013

Here's what I'd like to see happen at Old Trafford this coming Thursday: Australia win the toss and bat, amass a total in excess of 600, and then bowl England out cheaply twice (following them on) and win by an innings and plenty. After that Australia go on to win the fourth and fifth Tests as well and so regain the Ashes. Everybody is gobsmacked at the dramatic turnaround in national fortunes.

I won't indulge any other of my wishful dreams for you. That one only had the function of setting up what is to follow here - a passage by Scyld Berry recommending that England now go all out to 'inflict maximum damage on Australia this summer', destroying the Test futures of some of the Australian players in the process. I wanted to make it clear first that this is NOT what I would like to see. But it does describe what I take to be the truespirit of Ashes cricket, as against that soft stuff about wanting a more even contest. Here is Scyld Berry:

No Hiding Place was a television series of the Sixties. It is also another name for a five-Test series between England and Australia.

Therein lies the beauty of an Ashes series. And the cruelty. It is the time when the law of the jungle applies to cricket - the only time in this world of administrative folly where five-Test series have otherwise been abolished.

In this coming pair of back-to-back Tests, starting at Old Trafford on Thursday, England have the chance of making their task in Australia this winter a lot easier - by seeking out and destroying one Australian cricketer after another, as many as they can.

If this sounds too cruel for sport, it is exactly what Australia have done to England through the ages, especially in the recent era when they were world champions. Of Nasser Hussain's team in the 2002-03 series in Australia, no fewer than seven players never played a Test for England again - the victims of Steve Waugh's policy of inflicting mental and physical disintegration.

Of Andrew Flintoff's team who toured Australia in 2006-07, four members never played another Test for England, physically or mentally broken by the experience. As war veterans, they retired to the allotments of county cricket and tended roses.

Did you know that the fifth most sexy accent in the world is Australian? Well, I didn't. That, in any case, is according to a poll of '5,000 women from around the world', the full results of which are here:

July 29, 2013

There's much in the press about the Israeli decision to release Palestinian prisoners as a step towards re-starting peace talks, and how difficult the decision was for the Israeli government. Still, there are ways and ways of reporting the item. Here's William Booth in the Washington Post:

The list of prisoners who may be released in coming days includes militants who threw firebombs, in one case at a bus carrying children; stabbed and shot civilians, including women, elderly Jews and suspected Palestinian collaborators; and ambushed and killed border guards, police officers, security agents and soldiers. All of them have been in prison for at least two decades; some were serving life sentences.

The prisoner issue is highly emotive among Palestinian families, many of whom have direct experience of the imprisonment of a close relative. The release of long-term prisoners – seen as national heroes – is likely to warm public attitudes towards renewed talks.

Sherwood does also refer to an Israeli girl 'whose mother was slightly injured in a suicide bombing eight years ago in which two Israeli soldiers died'. But from her the focus is not so much on buses carrying children or on the stabbing and shooting of civilians, including women and elderly Jews.

Facts may be sacred while comment is free; but facts are also selected and accentuated in different ways.

Will Self is only the zillionth aesthete to sound this patrician note about the vulgarity and mindlessness of sport, but you need to read some of it to appreciate the depth of its contempt for a great portion of humankind - those of us who spend some of our time enjoying sport. Here he is:

You'll be aware by now that of all the frenzied crowds that trouble my uneasy sleep, sporting ones bother me the most. I mean to say, to be crushed to death by a mob that is rampaging because tyranny flies at its backs has a certain justness but to be stomped on by people driven berserk by a ball game would be a pitiful end. Sporting events by their nature embody the worst excesses of late capitalism: the spectators are mere passive consumers of the commodified prowess of the athletes and the seasonal character of the spectacles mimics the cyclic time that this new peasantry is trapped in, while the masters of money and power forge ahead. No wonder sports fans are so often pissed off: they're the victims of a massive con.

And there's more if you want it: not just the excesses of late capitalism, the passive consumers and new peasantry, but also 'the monstrous synchrony of a group mind', the 'disturbing unanimity', 'the eyes sliding back and forth like those of automata' and so forth, fifth or even sixth.

Let's get two things straight. One, you don't like sport, you don't have to like it; nobody's forcing you. You can like what you want, and we can like what we do, likewise. Two, in a capitalist society, sport is affected by commercial imperatives: just as breakfast cereals are, movies, music and a whole lot of other spheres of human endeavour.

But to use either or both of these circumstances to insult the intelligence and imagination of others who don't happen to share your philistine attitudes towards a range of skilful, sometimes beautiful, often riveting, occasionally thrilling human pursuits, to have the cheek to dehumanize these others by questioning their claim to thoughtful individuality, by treating them as captives of a monstrous synchrony, mere automata, and all on account of a difference in aesthetic preferences - this is to be a bit too bloody full of your bloody (will) self, and nothing more.

Was Wilfred Burchett - famous, or notorious, Australian journalist - in the pay of the KGB? I don't know. But Robert Manne lays out what he takes to be sound evidence that Burchett was. He (Manne) starts by providing the context of earlier controversy on the question:

Among Australian journalists there has been no individual more lionised or demonised than Wilfred Burchett.

Burchett's supporters include some of Australia's more prominent left-wing journalists, academics and filmmakers, such as John Pilger, Phillip Knightley, Ben Kiernan, Gavan McCormack and David Bradbury. They regard Burchett as one of the most brilliant and independent 20th-century reporters, whose greatness is found in his unfailing humanity and, in McCormack's words, "uncommon moral passion", and in the courage it took to report world affairs during the Cold War from what is customarily called "the other side". They regard Burchett's famous report of the conditions in Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and his ten or more years of reporting the Vietnam War from behind communist lines as his greatest achievements. And they regard the fact that Burchett was stripped of his Australian passport by the Menzies government after the Korean War as one of the most shameful abuses of human rights in the history of Australia.

Burchett's enemies include (or included) some of Australia's most influential postwar anti-communist or conservative activists, journalists and intellectuals – BA Santamaria, Denis Warner, Frank Knopfelmacher and Peter Coleman, editor of Quadrant. In the 1980s I was associated with this group. We regarded Burchett as a lifelong communist propagandist, who shamed himself in particular by his defence of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe; by his work on the enemy side during the Korean War where his journalism was directed and paid for by the Chinese government, where he visited prisoner-of-war camps holding Australian soldiers under atrocious conditions and where he was involved in the process of producing forced confessions from captured US air pilots on trumped-up charges of germ warfare; by his support for the Soviet Army's brutal crushing of the anti-communist Hungarian uprising of 1956; and by his breathless enthusiasm for Maoist China in general and for the Great Leap Forward in particular, in which, it is now estimated, up to 40 million Chinese starved to death.

Manne then presents the evidence for Burchett's involvement with the KGB, and concludes so:

The new documentary evidence about Burchett's relations with the KGB places [his] supporters in an awkward position. They might resume their attack on the messenger of unpleasant tidings. They might claim that the document in the Bukovsky archive is a forgery. They might assert that there is nothing untoward in being a paid agent of a secret police force responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. They might simply try to ignore the evidence that has been presented in this article. Or they might, instead, re-think their position on the Burchett question.

I'll carry over the theme of ten from yesterday and point you towards a list of ten best Westerns, compiled by Philip French for the Observer. Readers are invited to propose their own, so here is mine, as of today. Apart from the The Wild Bunch, which is top of the heap, they're in no particular order.

July 28, 2013

Today is the tenth anniversary of normblog; it began on 28 July 2003 with a simple 'Let's go' (in the immortal words of Sam Peckinpah). To mark the occasion I offer a brief fact and/or observation for each of the ten years.

1. Since my 70th birthday falls late next month, I have now been blogging more or less daily for a seventh of my life, and I have to say I find this astonishing. It would be different if I were only 14. But a seventh of my life at my age! And when blogging still seems a bit like something that's just happened. Anyway, ten years ago I had not the slightest inkling of what I was getting into from a temporal point of view.

2. It's the writing. Maybe I should have been a diarist, though I have never had that inclination; but the main reason I blog and have kept at blogging is that I enjoy the process of putting together an argument or just setting out something that I hope will be of interest to others. That is what motivates me here.

3. Since I started this blog, there have been 15,045 posts - which is 125 per month and some 4 per day on average.

4. The best thing for me about blogging, no question, is the many new friends I've made through doing it. This is internet friends and face-to-friends both. I know people in Australia, in North America, why, even in London, whom I would not have known but for the correspondence that first grew up between us because of my blog, often leading to later personal meetings. I value these friendships enormously. The tale that people who spend too much time on their computers are made lonely by it is one-sided at best.

5. The Euston Manifesto was the main political outcome of my blogging and that is something I'm happy about. I don't mean to claim sole ownership of it. It was produced for a loose grouping of people and there were other inputs than mine, though I was the principal author. But my participation in the group that produced it and what I wrote of the actual text would not have happened had I not been writing regularly for normblog, and in that way my blogging was a precondition. There are, of course, shortcomings in the document; but all in all, and for the time when it was produced, I'm reasonably proud of it.

6. I am grateful to those who have supported normblog over the years, friendly readers, whether regular or occasional - people who email me with pertiment comment, leaving aside the small number amongst these who don't know how to disagree without being unpleasant about it. It is a mark of the general point I'm making here how little of my email correspondence has been of this unpleasant, and how much of it of the other, kind.

7. The total number of visits to normblog over the whole ten years has been slightly in excess of 5,797,000 - on average nearly 1,600 a day.

9. The pleasure of writing (registered at 2 above) has its negative counterpart in the pressure to find something to blog about on 'slow' days: days when the news agenda is rebarbative to one's inclinations, and when Google News and Twitter and Facebook all fail to yield something you want to hook on to. Gee, I hate it when that happens. But happen it does and I suppose must now and again, otherwise I'd just be an automaton and then where would I be?

10. Last night, and I think for the first time ever, I actually dreamt a conceptual argument. The dream had other features, with the weirdness that dreams often display. I was at a conference and a friend I was talking to was two different (real) people I have known, now one, now the other. I was annoyed because I still had a question I wanted to raise and the chair had let the session run down and start to break up even though there were still 15 scheduled minutes unused. An item of clothing of mine was - how shall I put it? - not properly in position, and in a way that would normally have embarrassed me but because of my irritation, didn't. Yet, in among all this, my shape-shifter friend set out a conceptual argument (about the transformation problem in Marx, if you must know) that I have never thought while I was awake and that was new to me. I wonder if ten years of blogging can do this to a person: get you dreaming conceptually in search of something to use later on the blog.

By chance I came across these two different pieces within a couple of days of each other. The first is from an interview with Noam Chomsky (and please don't let that prejudice you one way or another):

[W]hat is really striking to me about India, much more than most other countries I have been to, is the indifference of privileged sectors to the misery of others. You walk through Delhi and cannot miss it, but people just don't seem to see it. Everyone is talking about 'Shining India' and yet people are starving. I had an interesting experience with this once. I was in a car in Delhi and with me was (activist) Aruna Roy, and we were driving towards a demonstration. And I noticed that she wasn't looking outside the window of the car. I asked her why. She said, "If you live in India, you just can't look outside the window. Because if you do, you'd rather commit suicide. It's too horrible. So you just don't look." So people don't look, they put themselves in a bubble and then don't see it. And those words are from somebody who has devoted her life to the lives of the poor, and you can see why she said that - the misery and the oppression are so striking, much worse than in any country I have ever seen. And it is so dramatic.

Until three years ago I did not believe in magic. But that was before I began investigating how western brands perform a conjuring routine that makes the great Indian rope trick pale in comparison. Now I'm beginning to believe someone has cast a spell over the world's consumers.

This is how it works. Well Known Company makes shiny, pretty things in India or China. The Observer reports that the people making the shiny, pretty things are being paid buttons and, what's more, have been using children's nimble little fingers to put them together. There is much outrage, WKC professes its horror that it has been let down by its supply chain and promises to make everything better. And then nothing happens. WKC keeps making shiny, pretty things and people keep buying them. Because they love them. Because they are cheap. And because they have let themselves be bewitched.
.....
Drive east out of Delhi for an hour or so into the industrial wasteland of Ghaziabad and take a stroll down some of the back lanes. You might want to watch your step, to avoid falling into the stinking open drains. Take a look through some of the doorways. See the children stitching the fine embroidery and beading? Now take a stroll through your favourite mall and have a look at the shelves. Recognise some of that handiwork? You should.

In their different ways both passages highlight the indifference of the relatively comfortable to the sufferings of others, and a question that has been on my mind for many years now: what is the extent of our obligation to others who are under assault or in terrible emergency? I have no precise answer to the question. In the book under the link immediately above, I argued that people unwilling to help others in great need cannot reasonably expect help themselves should the same situation ever befall them - but that this was a terrible ethic to accept as governing our world, though to a large degree it does. At the same time, while most of us - who are not saints - owe more than we deliver, we cannot fairly be held to owe our entire lives, all our energies and efforts; we are entitled to reserve a 'space' for our own pursuits and concerns. That may in part explain the sense of futility individuals can feel in face of injustices too large for them to make a serious impact on, much less to remedy. So, most of us have duties of aid more demanding than we fulfil; even if it is also true that none of us can reasonably be expected to give 'everything' for others. It follows from the assumption that these others have rights to a decent life that we do, too.

The solutions, needless to say, can only be political, depending in each given case on the actions of many people. But adequate political solutions rely for their own part on an adequate conception of ameliorative ethics.